The Hylaeus Project

(2011-2017)
 

A multimedia documentation of the endangered Hawaiian Hylaeus bees
with artist | illustrator  Aidan Koch

In 2008 while working for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation I co-authored petitions to the US Fish & Wildlife Service to list seven Hawaiian Hylaeus species as endangered. These largely overlooked bees are vital pollinators of native Hawaiian plants, and they had been vanishing without hardly any notice. A few years later, I took the information I had learned and began The Hylaeus Project - an experiment in using art to get the word out about these imperiled and fantastic species. In the summer of 2013 artist Aidan Koch and I spent a month in Hawaii documenting the Hawaiian Hylaeus through visual art, natural history writing, music composition, and photography. We traversed all sorts of present and former Hylaeus habitat to find them, from beaches to barren lava flows and montane forests, with our nets, aspirators, notebooks and recording devices in tow. {The Hylaeus are commonly known as ‘yellow-faced bees’ for the pale ivory to bright yellow markings on the males’ heads.}

I compiled and edited our work into an illustrated book called The Hylaeus Project (designed and published by Publication Studio), and wrote a set of music compositions for Secret Drum Band. The book includes interviews with Hawaiian naturalists, watercolor plates and chapters on each field site that we visited. The music draws on the soundscapes of our field sites, and was featured in a 2014 cassette release and Secret Drum Band’s 2017 full length record, Dynamics.